Artist Response No 2

Empire 24/7 by Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle is a German artist who was born in Stuttgart in 1950 lives and works in New York. As the short essay about him and his work states, he founded the internet forum "The Thing" , a creative online community where debates about art happens at the beginnings of the 1990s.

However, the first thought that came to my mind while reading about Wolfgang Staehle's work was the way how he, as a modern artist, uses new and present technology to create "art". Although I am not familiar with the history of art, I could imagine that there are only a few artist who move with the times and adapt their way of producing art. That is way, I am so interested in his project Empire 24/7, showing the Empire State Building around the clock. As already in the essay mentioned, anybody around the world who has access to the internet would have been able to witness Staehle's idea of art.

Another aspect I would like to mention is the legitimized questioning of this truly being art. Wouldn't be anybody be able to set up a digital camera pointing at the Empire State Building and thuis creatinga "virtual window, as if one could see through the Karlsruhe museum's gallery wall directly into New York City"? Well, at this point, one can draw the connection to Bart Rosier's text "What is Art?". He states that there are six critera worth considering. One of them says, "anything can be a work of art". So in the same way as Warhol already did, Wolfgang Staehle made it no longer possible to distinguish something that is art from something that is not.

Furthermore, his project Empire24/7 shows not merely the Empire State Building, but also the two twin towers and how the got destroyed. In order to depict this tragic historical event he displays five chronological pictures. The firts one depicts the New York city in all its beauty, the last one, however, shows the dust and darkened sky after the the twin towers collapsed. Through this row of pictures, the artist is able to communicate with us. It appears as if he would tell us a story and tells us what exactly happens. Here again, we can draw a connection to Rozier's text. He states that according to John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, art is "the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings". So here art is defined as symbolic images as a means of communication.